As the “global economy” continues to expand, so does the need to be able to communicate over potentially long distances with other people. One area of communication that has seen steady growth and increased customer confidence is the use of the internet and other networking topographies. With the constant growth and development of networking capabilities has come the ability to implement more and better products and features. One area in particular that has seen growth and development in both quantity and quality is the area of internet enabled phone calls, using for example VoIP. By taking audio signals (the speaker's voice) and converting them into internet protocol (IP) packets, IP phones are able to send the audio signals over IP networks, such as the internet. Another technology enabled by the internet is video conferencing. Similar to internet enabled phone calls, internet enabled video conferencing is done by converting the audio and video data for the video conference into IP packets that are sent between the endpoints.
In order for video conferences or phone calls to be conducted over an IP network in real-time it is desirable to send/receive the packets in as little time as possible. Because packets may take different paths in an IP network the transit time of packets may vary and the packets may arrive in an order different than the order in which they were sent. A common device used to ensure that packets are presented smoothly despite being received at varying times and in an improper order is a jitter buffer. The jitter buffer temporarily stores the packets before they are presented to the user. Typical jitter buffers are set to hold the packets for a predetermined amount of time. The amount of time is usually based on assumptions, often worst case scenario type assumptions, as to the difference between the longest expected transit time and the shortest expected transit time. Some devices use jitter buffers that may increase the size of the jitter buffer if packets become lost because the jitter buffer is too small.